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Chikoo Mousse

If you’re like me, you spend a lot of time wondering how you can possibly make mousse without gelatin. Chocolate mousse is easy – when the melted chocolate cools it provides enough substance to set the mousse. (At least I think that’s how it works.) How about other mousses, though? How about fruit mousses, for instance? How does that work? It might not seem like a very pressing question, because I don’t actually make mousse all that often. But when I discovered chikoo fruit, that unlikely-looking but ridiculously delicious fruit that tastes like caramelized pears, I was determined to make a mousse. Why? Because chickoo mousse, besides being very fun to say, also sounds a lot like Eek-a-Mouse. Right? Well, my first attempt became derailed, because I couldn’t make a thick enough custard to set the mousse, so I made it into ice cream instead, which turned out very tasty indeed.

Last week, as I was making the cardamom pastry cream for my champagne mango tart, I had a revelation. An epiphany. Pastry cream is certainly thick enough to set a mousse! And my cardamom pastry cream tasted so good I was eating it by the spoonful. And cardamom and chikoo would be delicious together. I had some pastry cream left over. I had a can of chikoo in light syrup I’d bought on my last super bodega traveling mission, that I was saving for a special occasion such as this. All planets were aligned!

The mousse is a little softer than perhaps is traditional, but pleasantly so. It’s very lightly flavored with cardamom, the sweetness of the chikoo carries the day, and it made a nice small sweet thing to eat after a heavy and intensely flavored feast of Indian take out. I’ll be deploying pastry cream in mousse-related projects many times in the days to come! You could easily make this recipe with any other sweet soft fruit. Strawberries would be nice! Or mangoes – mangoes would be perfect!